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Monday, February 16, 2009

Iraq's Pre-1950 History Revisited: Conclusion

(See below for parts 1- 9)

Nearly 150,000 U.S. military troops and 200,000 private contractors are still in Iraq trying to exercise a special influence on Iraqi history, by waging an imperialist war on behalf of special U.S. corporate interests. Yet most people in the United States probably didn't learn very much about Iraqi history in their high school social studies courses. But some knowledge of pre-1950 Iraqi history may be of use to U.S. anti-war activists when arguing with U.S. opponents of immediate withdrawal from Iraq and U.S. supporters of the Democratic Obama Regime’s war in Iraq, during the next 16 months.

Despite the political repression and martial law in 1940s Iraq, as late as May 1950 less than 14,000 of Iraq’s 130,000 to 150,000 people of Jewish background had left Iraq to live within the Zionist movement’s undemocratic new state in Palestine. So, to “encourage immigration,” the Israeli government apparently then arranged for anti-Semitic attacks to take place in Baghdad. According to the Palestinian Book Project’s 1977 book, Our Roots Are Still Alive:

“A series of bombings aimed at Jewish stores, synagogues and cafes stampeded a hundred thousand Iraqi Jews in a panicked flight to Israel. Many years later, an Israeli magazine, Ha’olam Hazeh (5/29/66) published the confession of an Israeli agent, Yehuda Tager. Israelis had been responsible for the bombings in Baghdad to `encourage immigration.’”

The “encouraged” legal immigration of Iraqis of Jewish religious background from Iraq to Israel/Palestine began in May 1950; and when it ended in August 1951, the number of Iraqis of Jewish background had decreased by an additional 110,000. As a result, according to the 1978 book The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq by Hanna Batatu, “the Shiite merchants succeeded to first place in the trade of Baghdad after the exodus of the Jews…” At the same time, the U.S. government, after 1950, began to replace the UK government as the major foreign government that undemocratically attempted to exercise a special influence on the internal political affairs of Iraq, in violation of international law and the United Nations Charter.

As this revisiting of Iraq’s pre-1950 history reveals, people in Iraq have been consistently demanding an end to the colonization of their country since the end of World War I. So as the current U.S.-led military occupation of Iraq continues under the Democratic Obama regime, U.S. anti-war activists still have an internationalist obligation to work for an immediate end to the morally bankrupt attempt to re-colonize Iraq in the 21st-century on behalf of U.S. corporate interests.